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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A new challenger bank launched this week with the goal of serving the needs of Latin American consumers in the U.S. Built on Galileo’s payment processing platform, Miami, Florida-based Fortú is dedicated to providing culturally-contextual financial and banking services to the country’s growing Latino and Hispanic populations.
Fortú co-founders Charles Yim and Apoio Doca bring a combination of Big Tech savvy and global neobanking experience to the task of better serving the 22% of Hispanic adults who, according to the Federal Reserve, are underbanked. Yim is a former Amazon Web Services and Google executive with a background in business development and partnerships. Doca helped build a pre-smartphone era digital bank based in Brazil called Lemon Bank that was acquired by Banco do Brasil.
The Fortú team features both first and second generation immigrants with family ties to many of the largest Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. Together they bring this experience to the cause of helping others negotiate the unique challenges many Latinos and Hispanics face when banking in the U.S.
“Compared to other demographics, Latinos in the U.S. are more likely to live in multigenerational and multilingual households, with a significant percentage needing to send regular cross-border remittances, leading to an over-reliance on non-bank financial services,” Doca said. He added that financial barriers for Latinos and Hispanics can range broadly from a lack of non-English language services to more mundane annoyances like the tendency to randomly truncate Latino names – many of which do not fit within the 24-character embossing standard used by most financial institutions.
Fortú offers a digital bank account that can be opened without needing a social security number; a Mastercard debit card; fast, no-hidden-fee international transfers (courtesy of a partnership with Finovate alum Wise), as well as the ability to deposit cash at more than 100,000 retail locations like CVS and Walmart, and make free cash withdrawals at more than 55,000 Allpoint ATM locations.
“By creating products to answer the needs of Latinos, who are more likely than the general population to be under- and unbanked, Fortú has set itself apart from other neobanks, while transforming financial wellness for the Latino community,” Galileo CEO Clay Wilkes said.
Fortú has raised $5 million in funding from Valar Ventures and other investors. The fintech’s banking services are provided by LendingClub Bank.
Loyalty and rewards may seem like dated technology. After all, the conversation around loyalty and rewards peaked in 2012 when merchant-funded rewards and in-statement offers were the hottest new customer acquisition bait.
Today’s banking environment that focuses on the customer is proving that the technology isn’t all hype, however. Almost a decade after the merchant-funded rewards conversation, there’s still activity going on in the loyalty and rewards space.
As proof, banking app and smart card Curve announced today it is partnering with purchase-based marketing intelligence firm Cardlytics, which will power Curve’s new rewards program. Dubbed Curve Rewards, the app will offer Curve users a range of rewards from Cardlytics’ brand partners, including Pret a Manger, JustEat, FatFace, Harvey Nichols, and Cult Beauty. Two of the merchants piloting Curve’s new program, Harvey Nichols and Cult Beauty, will offer 20% off and 5% off respectively.
Curve Rewards leverages Cardlytics’ purchase intelligence data and will help customers earn while they spend. This data-driven approach ensures that the rewards offered to the consumer are personalized to their spending habits.
“Today’s consumers want a reward scheme that is tailored to how they shop and why they shop,” said Cardlytics’ Head of Bank Partnerships Campbell Shaw. “We’re pleased to have built a reward scheme for Curve that does just that, putting customers back in the driving seat while building loyalty and engagement for Curve.”
The partnership is especially notable for Cardlytics. In the company’s thirteen year history, the partnership with Curve is its first digital-native brand. Up until this point, Cardlytics’ partnerships were primarily with traditional financial institutions, including Lloyds Banking Group, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Santander.
Founded in 2008, Dwolla is one of the fintech originals. Because of its long-standing history in the fintech space, the Iowa-based company has been through a lot of changes as it evolves with banks, fintechs, and consumer demand.
Since its start, Dwolla has focused on offering an alternative to the traditionally slow ACH money transfer system. Initially, the company tackled this objective through a direct-to-consumer (DTC) product, which allowed individual users to sign up for Dwolla to make peer-to-peer money transfers and transact with the company’s merchant partners.
As part of its DTC solution, Dwolla even offered a cardless credit product called Instant. The tool would lend users up to $5,000 for one month, with no interest, in exchange for a $3 per month subscription fee.
As an evolution of its credit offering, the company partnered with Alliance Data to launchDwolla Credit. The ecommerce point of sale product worked much like PayPal in that users would select a Pay with DWOLLA button at the point of sale to complete their purchase. Funds would transfer on Dwolla’s rails to enable merchants to receive the funds instantly in their Dwolla account.
Despite the company’s numerous innovations in the consumer space, Dwolla received the most traction from its bank-focused product, FiSync, a payments protocol for real-time money transfers. The success of this tool prompted the company to exit the consumer space in 2016 to focus on creating payment APIs.
Today, Dwolla’s API helps organizations integrate payments into their application to send, collect, and facilitate payments. Earlier this year the company doubled down on its roots in faster payments to deliver real time payments in collaboration with Cross River Bank. The new, instant payment option leverages the RTP Network to send money directly to a bank account in seconds.
In a post-COVID world in which consumers have been trained to conduct more of their daily transactions online, Dwolla’s real-time payments capability will play a key role. “The immediacy of real-time payments will fundamentally change how businesses operate,” said Dwolla CEO Brady Harris. “As electronic payments continue to grow in adoption, RTP is the perfect complement to our ACH and Push-to-Debit offerings.”
Dwolla, a three-time Finovate alum, most recently demoed at FinovateSpring 2015 where it debuted FiSync. The company has raised $51.4 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, High Alpha, and Foundry Group.
This is a sponsored post from Michael Hom, Global Head of Financial Services Solutions, InterSystems, Gold Sponsors of FinovateSpring.
The banking and finance industry has always been capable of adapting. But as the world recovers from the pandemic, banking and financial services face a new disruption from fintechs and “neobanks.” With lower cost bases and a very different, technology-driven approach to customer experience, these newcomers have been developing fast.
The financial services sector has also experienced a massive rise in digital banking usage caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. For institutions with healthy infrastructure, this was a big positive, whether it was in high net worth advisory or remote banking. It also showed the centrality of high-quality digital user experience to today’s customers.
We must not assume, however, that all is well on the disruptor/innovator side. Some internet-only banks were laying off staff during the pandemic because their ramp-up costs are high – and their paying customer bases are still growing. They also have market share and profit margin challenges through stiff competition from other fintechs.
Established finance institutions, on the other hand, have huge numbers of customers and significant revenue streams. Their challenge: to innovate and make their legacy systems and data management strategies swift enough to keep up with their new upstart challengers. These legacy systems and problems with data management have hampered innovation.
The challenger banks and fintechs, by contrast, are far more agile: they have perhaps two-thirds lower technology costs and offer the interfaces and functionality younger consumers and companies want. They also have investors who support them. Yet they don’t have the scale of the big banks, nor the data. In banking, success is all about scale and achieving it is not easy. Each side also has different cost-pressures. While the fintechs concentrate on the cost of getting a new customer through the door, banking industry incumbents want to be more efficient and reduce the cost of execution.
How the industry will evolve
Large banks know if they get the connection right with consumers and corporations, they will be in a much better position in the next five or ten years. To do this, however, they need the fintechs’ agility. They must simplify their data management so they can adapt to changes in demand rapidly and scale as workloads increase. They must be capable of building and deploying data-intensive AI applications faster so they can transform the user experience for consumers. There needs to be a wider recognition that simpler approaches can be highly effective.
Fintechs and neobanks, on the other hand, need a compelling value proposition to attract consumers and generate meaningful revenues.
This is why the incumbents and the fintechs will draw closer through collaboration or acquisition. By collaborating with incumbents, fintechs and neobanks can use their digital skills and innovation to make niche areas of the established institutions’ operations far more profitable while benefiting from access to a massive customer base it would otherwise take them years to acquire.
Modern data management technology such as microservices, APIs and API management, have lowered barriers to publish and consume services, creating a dynamic ecosystem that allows organizations to focus on their core competencies and differentiation. They can rely on the ecosystem for commoditized, non-core, and non-differentiating capabilities.
Acquisition, on the other hand, brings its own problems, since the pace of innovation often slows once a young organization has been bought by an established competitor.
For these reasons, we may see a hybrid model between collaboration and acquisition, in which the big incumbents develop through consolidation into aggregators, becoming open banking marketplaces and acting as the nexus between customers and services. A new digital retail bank may, for example, use a major player’s credit expertise, risk and control mechanisms while designing a new user experience from scratch.
Whichever model of cooperation it is, the new offerings devised together by incumbents and fintechs will have to stand out. With so much competition, differentiation through excellence in technology, customer experience and support will be essential.
What does the future require?
Agility is vital to the future of banking and should be a major aim for all ambitious financial organizations. Mindsets must change as well as technology.
From now on, senior management in banks must think like their counterparts at software companies. That means constantly gleaning what is going well or wrong and acting on it. When there are problems, they should be fixed before customers are fully aware. Many neobanks are leading the way on this, updating their apps weekly. Big banks, by contrast, are much slower, updating apps yearly or quarterly, with a few in the four-to-six week timeframe. This has to change.
When deciding how to transform, incumbent organizations must ask themselves how they are addressing client and employee needs in terms of products, services, and information. They must build a picture of where banking is going and be confident they are heading in the same direction. Established banks must become product-oriented organizations just like digital native rivals, abolishing internal boundaries and creating cross-functional teams under product owners.
Keep the organizational DNA alive
Scale, innovation, and agility have become vital attributes in banking. Yet as incumbent institutions adapt and assess which newcomers to partner with or acquire, it is essential they do not lose sight of what it is that makes them special or forget what their goal is. Banks are still about people, processes, and technology, and the people side of the business is where high levels of service and distinctiveness enable the organization to stand out and build profitable long-term relationships.
If organizations lose their DNA, they will crumble. Incumbent banks have a larger and more diverse customer base that is difficult to please and, in today’s world, less likely to tolerate low levels of service from loss of organizational focus.
Established banks must be as nimble as possible and collectively approach their work as if their business model is at risk every day. It is not only digital transformation that is necessary, but also a mental mind-shift. Only then can banks believe they are on the path to digital transformation, resilience, and long-term profitability.
In an era when SPACs are the hip new way to take a company public, corporate expense management technology company Expensify is taking the old fashioned route.
The San Francisco-based fintech announced this week it has submitted an S-1 document– a key step on the road to an initial public offering to the SEC. The S-1 was submitted confidentially. Since Expensify is considered an “emerging growth company,” the contents of the filing do not need to be made public until 21 days prior to the road show for the IPO.
Expensify, which reached profitability at the end of 2018, has not yet determined the size and price range for the proposed IPO.
Founded in 2008, Expensify launched with its flagship receipt-scanning app and a simple motto, “Expense reports that don’t suck!” Since then, the company has gone on to launch a corporate payment card, offer a COVID-friendly virtual travel assistant, andexpand into billpay.
Expensify’s IPO is expected to commence after the completion of the SEC review process, subject to market and other conditions. The company has raised a total of $38.2 million. David Barrett, who Finovate interviewed about the company’s launch, is CEO.
In the age of “diamond-handed” growth investors and message board stock jockeys, does anyone even analyze stocks any more?
Israel-based online stock research firm TipRanks is betting that the answer is “yes.” The company, which offers solutions that enable investors to quickly analyze stock market data and the performance of market analysts, secured a $77 million investment in a round led by technology group Prytek last month. The funding will help the nine-year old fintech take advantage of the surging interest in trading and investing by retail customers.
TipRanks leverages Natural Language Processing technology to review and analyze data from a wide variety of sources including analyst forecasts, financial bloggers, insider activity, news sentiment, and both the collective wisdom of individual investors on the platform as well as the actual investments by top hedge fund managers. A two-time Finovate Best of Show winner, TipRanks offers quantitative tools like its Smart Score for stocks and its Star Ranking System for analysts to allow investors to quickly assess a stock’s prospects or the value of a given analyst’s opinion.
“In addition to being the only company that ranks analysts based on their performance rather than the prestige of the bank they work for, we are the only company that makes aggregated analyst ratings available to retail investors,” TipRanks co-Founder and CEO Uri Gruenbaum said. “We analyze all finance-related news, corporate filings, analyst research, and social media to provide retail investors with the same level of information that only institutional investors can afford. By doing so, we enable retail investors to make data-driven investment decisions.”
The investment takes TipRanks’ total funding to $80 million. The company will use the new capital to add to its workforce, having experienced a significant jump in demand for its solutions in 2020. TipRanks noted that it has more than four million monthly users in the wake of a 3x boost for its subscription-based services last year. Gruenbaum added that TipRanks also plans to expand its research coverage to include other asset classes and markets such as cryptocurrencies and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
The new partnership will also give TipRanks access to Prytek’s tools and datasets which bring greater transparency to online investment advisory. Founded in 2017, Prytek is an Israel-based multinational technology group that specializes in investing in new technologies and delivering managing services to companies in financial services and other verticals via its Business Operating Platform-as-a-Service model (BOPaaS).
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring Digital on May 10 through 13, 2021. Register today and save your spot.
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Of all the trends accelerated by the global pandemic, enhancing customer engagement may be both the most critical and the most enduring as we transition toward a post-COVID world. In the latest edition of his Finovate Podcast, host Greg Palmer talks with Crayon Data founder and CEO Suresh Shankar about his takeaways from 2020 and what he expects from fintechs and their customers in 2021.
Shankar founded Crayon Data, a big data/AI startup, in 2012. The Singapore-based company helps businesses succeed by leveraging enterprise data to create digital-first customer experiences. Crayon’s flagship platform, maya.ai, enables businesses to boost revenues, reach inactive customers, and cut down on time and effort on low-ROI marketing campaigns – all by delivering highly relevant, highly personalized digital experiences to customers without compromising privacy. Crayon Data made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope last year.
The Finovate Podcast is also a great source for 30,000 ft high observations on both the fintech landscape as well as the broader terrain of technological innovation. Greg Palmer’s recent conversation with futurist Nancy Giordano delves into what she calls the “Productivity Revolution” and its implications for fintech and financial services.
“There was a way we approached building the industrial era of the 20th century and prior that now no longer holds up and we have to have a really different way of thinking as we move into the future. ‘Leadering’ (the title of her new book) is the contrast to ‘leadership’. It’s a verb that’s dynamic and inclusive and caring and allows us to build the future that we really want to build … It sounds lofty, but it’s actually pretty practical.”
A guest lecturer at Singularity University, a ten-year TEDx curator, founder of Play Big Inc. consultancy, and one of the premier female futurists in the world, Giordano consistently underscores the role of the individual in times of rapid change and disruption. Her new book, Leadering: The Ways Visionary Leaders Play Bigger, connects the rise of innovative technologies with changing societal expectations to give individuals insight into what it takes to create human-centered solutions and long-term value.
For more from the Finovate podcast, check out our podcast archives.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) company Sezzle is planning to strike while the iron is hot.
The Minnesota-based firm, which is already publicly-listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), is hoping to capture U.S. investors, now that the BNPL trend has exploded in this continent. Plans for the public listing are still in early stages. Details, such as the timing, price, and use, have not been revealed.
Prompting the plan to list is the company’s recent growth. According to its latest earnings announcement, Sezzle added 400,000 customers and recruited 7,300 active merchants in the first quarter of this year. This boost brings the firm’s total users to 2.6 million and total merchants to 34,000. Not surprisingly, the surge in usage helped increase the company’s first quarter income, which was reported at $22.3 million.
Sezzle initially went public on the ASX in July of 2019, raising $30 million on its first day of trading. The company now has a market cap of over $777 million. This figure is almost 5x higher than it was at the start of 2020. Sezzle’s move to the U.S. public markets follows its competitor, Affirm, which debuted on the Nasdaq at the start of this year.
Sezzle’s BNPL technology allows customers to split their ecommerce purchases into four installments with only 25% down and no fees. The offering is currently available to shoppers in the U.S., Canada, and India, and will soon be offered to residents in Brazil.
In February, Sezzle teamed up with Discover to work with select merchants on Discover’s network to help them provide their customers with additional payment options. Last September, the company launched a virtual payments card that helps customers benefit from Sezzle’s BNPL tech when they make purchases at brick-and-mortar stores.
Sezzle was founded in 2016. Charlie Youakim is CEO.
In a round led by Meritech and Greylock, Canada-based fintech Wealthsimple has secured $610 million (C$750 million) in funding. The investment takes the online brokerage’s total capital to more than $1 billion, more than triples the company’s most recent valuation to $4 billion, and represents one of the largest financings for a Canadian technology company to date.
“Seven years ago, we launched Wealthsimple with just four people and a mission that many thought was naive: use technology and innovation to revolutionize the finance industry so every Canadian could achieve financial freedom, no matter who they are or how much money they have,” Wealthsimple co-founder and CEO Mike Katchen wrote on the company’s blog this morning. “I’m happy to say that our mission doesn’t seem quite so naive anymore.”
Also participating in the round were DST Global, Sagard, Iconiq, Dragoneer, TCV, iNovia, Allianz X, Base 10, Redpoint, STEADFAST, Alkeon, TSV, and Plus Capital. A host of Canadian celebrities were also involved in the funding, including actors Ryan Reynolds and Michael J. Fox; athletes Kelly Olynyk, Dwight Powell, and Patrick Marleau; and singer Drake.
Since its inception in 2014, Wealthsimple has grown into a firm with more than two million users who enjoy commission-free stock trading, automated investing, as well as access to cryptocurrencies and tax services. This spring, the company introduced its cash app, which enables Canadians to send and receive cash “in seconds.” Free and requiring no minimum balance to use, Wealthsimple Cash has been likened to Venmo, a popular cash app in the U.S. The app currently has daily spending limits of $5,000 a day and $20,000 a month; Wealthsimple said that this is significantly more generous than what is available through the big banks.
Wealthsimple’s investment news comes as the Toronto, Ontario-based fintech pivots to pursue new opportunities in the Canadian market (the company sold its U.S. investment advisory business to Betterment in March). During the investing mini-mania surrounding Robinhood and shares of Gamestop earlier this year, investors in Canada were weighing in by making Wealthsimple’s trading app the number one app on Canada’s Apple App Store and on Google Play. This ratings boost was accompanied by a 50% gain in sign-ups and a 2x increase in trading volume. The environment created by the global pandemic, according to Wealthsimple’s Katchen, played a significant role in the company’s growth; 18% of the country’s new brokerage accounts in the first half of 2020 were opened on Wealthsimple’s platform.
Like a growing number of fintechs, Wealthsimple also plans to extend its offerings to include cash, checking, insurance, and mortgage products with the goal of becoming the customer’s “primary financial institution“. The company initially earned its unicorn status in October, after securing an investment of $93 million (C$114 million). Power Corporation of Canada is the company’s majority shareholder, with a 43% of the company post-financing.
From U.K.-based Standard Chartered to Germany’s Deutsche Bank, banks around the world are adapting to the post-COVID world with fewer branches. In separate announcements only a few days a part, two of the globe’s bigger banking presences (Standard Chartered is the 44th biggest bank in the world by total assets; Deutsche Bank is ranked 21st) have signaled that hybrid workplaces will join digital transformation as defining aspects of banking operations in the future.
Standard Chartered’s announcement comes as the firm reports better-than-expected profits for the first quarter. The bank plans to reduce the size of its branch network to 400 – and move to a hybrid remote working setup – as part of a cost-cutting maneuver. Standard Chartered also announced that it will look to automation to “enable the re-shaping of the workforce.” Standard Chartered has a strong presence in Asia, Africa, and the MENA.
As for Deutsche Bank, company CEO Christian Sewing cited fewer branch customers and a growing preference for digital options among the reasons driving the move toward a hybrid model. Deutsche Bank expects to close 150 Deutsche Bank and Postbank branches this year with an additional 50 Postbank branches to be closed in 2022. At the same time, the company said it will introduce a hybrid workplace model for its employees that will allow them to work remotely up to three days a week.
Hybrid workplaces aren’t the only things that financial services workers will be getting used to in 2021. If the new employee training initiative from Spain-based BBVA is any indication, bank workers may find themselves being reskilled and upskilled just by playing a game.
BBVA has announced a new global reskilling and upskilling experience, The Camp, that is designed to enhance the employability of its professional workers. Part of BBVA’s learning model, Campus BBVA, the new experience focuses on 14 strategic skills that are taught using a digital, gamified environment in which the workers are the primary actors who determine their own development.
“The challenge of ensuring the survival of organizations entails adapting and being flexible enough for teams to be able to navigate this uncertainty and constantly incorporate the skills that are needed to promote the strategy,” Global Head of Learning at BBVA Pilar Concejo said.
Each of the 14 strategic skills has a different training itinerary. And each itinerary has three levels of specialization that uses a mountain-climbing analogy to assess the employee’s progress. Starting out as a metaphorical hiker, the employee advances from the valley (basic level) to the mountain (intermediate level), earning status as an “explorer.” Successfully advancing from the mountain to the summit (expert level) gives the employee the rank of “alpnist” – the highest level of specialization in the knowledge category.
“Gamification is a very important element at Campus BBVA, and now also at The Camp, as it allows us to design experiences in which employees feel much more identified and increase their level of commitment to the learning process,” Concejo said. “In the end, we try to ensure that the employee is motivated enough to move forward with their development in a continuous and sustainable manner over time.”
Here is our weekly look at fintech innovation around the world.
Washington, D.C.-based digital banking infrastructure company Securrency announced plans to expand in the UAE in the wake of its $30 million fundraising.
Financial Times featured Fusion Microfinance, a company that specializes in providing microloans of between Rs10,000 ($136) and Rs60,000 ($816) to poor women in India.
“We have built a world-class financial technology partner ecosystem which our clients can tap into as they build a future-proof bank,” Thought Machine CEO Paul Taylor explained. “The firms we choose to partner with are those that have built meaningful, ultra-reliable products that ultimately improve the banking experience for customers. We look forward to working with Wise to bring its industry-leading payments solution to many more financial institutions, and customers, around the world.”
To ensure cross-system interoperability, Thought Machine and Wise have built an integration layer that cuts down on the amount of development work needed to plug into Wise’s API by as much as 60%. The partnership is a response to the growing demand for faster, more affordable, and transparent multi-currency banking, and comes amid a broadening trend away from reliance on legacy core banking technology and traditional correspondent banking networks.
“Though the internet has transformed much of the economy, the global banking system has lagged behind and moving money internationally has remained slow, difficult, and expensive for most,” Wise Platform & Wise Business Managing Director Stuart Gregory said. “Our mission is to change this 一 a goal we share with Thought Machine. Our integration today makes it quicker and easier for financial institutions and banks to enable faster and cheaper payments for their customers and brings us one step closer to our mission of building money without borders.”
Wise is actually the second money transfer company that Thought Machine has teamed up with in the first half of 2021. In February, the company announced that it was working with TransferGo, who will use Thought Machine’s Vault to provide advanced platform capabilities that will enhance the customer experience. The company also recently forged partnerships with German software engineering company GFT to launch challenger bank BankLiteX, and with full-stack fintech solution provider Vacuumlabs, which leveraged ThoughtMachine’s Vault to power a virtual bank in Hong Kong. An alum of FinovateEurope, London-based Thought Machine has raised more than $148 million in funding.
A Finovate alum since 2013, Wise moves more than $6 billion every month, saving its 10 million customers $1.5 billion in hidden fees every year. Rebranding as Wise in February, the company unveiled its product roadmap earlier this month, highlighting new initiatives in customer experience, spending and cards, expansion, small business services, and security. The company offers a multi-currency account that enables individual users to take advantage of real exchange rates in more than 50 international currencies. Wise Business provides payment services including invoice payments, debit cards, P2P payments, and cash management to more than 400 businesses. The firm includes companies ranging from fellow Finovate alum Xero to challenger bank N26 among its customers.
